Alaska scientists report just 15% of Chum survived their 5 years at sea to return home to spawn
Chum salmon have been experiencing a steady collapse for many years
But a few years ago, in 2017, there was a miraculous recovery of these iconic Alaska salmon.
What’s going on with salmon? Are they doomed, or might they be saved?
Read on for an incredible story of hope.
The end of the 2020 season count of Chum Salmon in the upper Yukon River is just now completed, and the results are giving scientists a terrible sinking feeling. But it wasn’t just the chum heading to Canada that were in such a desperate situation.
Commercial fishermen in the lower Yukon harvested just 13,968 chums in the summer fishery, which was 97% less than the five-year average, which saw 449,000 fish caught every year.
Managers had predicted a rather average return of about 1.9 million summer chum. That would have allowed a harvestable surplus of about 1.1 million fish, according to ADFG. So the total river catch is more like 1% of what was expected.
The latest estimates aren’t just bad, they’re “absolutely dismal,” says Stephanie Quinn-Davidson, director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Alaska.
Every year, scientists count fish as they swim up the Yukon River past Eagle, Alaska, near the Canadian border, as they are nearing their end-of-life spawning journey. Five years ago, they had been swept out to sea in the spring floods as tiny minnows.
Those minnows/smolts, numbering in the hundreds of millions, made their way south to the vast ocean pastures of the Gulf of Alaska where they should have spent the last five years being nourished, thriving, and surviving on pastures filled with plankton, their principal food.
This year, the upper Yukon River total chum count is a mere 23,828 fish, so none were allowed to be caught. This is far below, less than 25%, of the minimum number of fish that scientists and management groups want to see. The ‘spawning escapement goal,’ the minimum number of returning fish needed to sustain the salmon requires at least healthy 100,000 adults.
This year, both the commercial and native fisheries in both Alaska and Canada have been closed. Many families along the Yukon River will go hungry this winter.
In the last 10 years, chum salmon have been faring better than the King, or Chinook, salmon that they share the river with. But not this year. The tiny return of Chum is said to come as a surprise to many scientists who were not expecting this year’s chum salmon numbers to be at such a catastrophic low. The same disaster scenario is true for the Chinook Salmon, again numbers so low no fishing was allowed.
The Eagle sonar counting station at Eagle, Alaska, offers an annual set of data for scientists to review. The station, 1200 miles from the ocean, has been counting salmon for 50 years. This year’s numbers for chum are ‘dismal’ says one researcher (Alaska Department of Fish and Game). Chum populations are known to fluctuate and even have big crashes, but this year’s numbers in the Yukon are the lowest in all of history. With so few spawning adults, future years’ returns will become even more dismal.
But what about that big run of Yukon Chum Salmon shown in the charted data for 2017?
With this year being the lowest number of Chum Salmon in history and just a few years ago, 2017, showing the largest number in history what could be the reason. Many fisheries managers and scientists are eager to put forth wild ideas that transfer blame to some unknowable reason or some knowable villains responsible.
At the top of this churlish list of ‘the usual suspects’ lies the fish hatcheries on both sides of the Pacific. Fish bureaucrats looking to shift the blame suggest the hatcheries are responsible for sending too many hatchery grown fish out to sea where they compete with the ‘pure natural’ stocks. But hatchery releases are nothing new, they have been taking place for decades, and there are no patterns of exceptional numbers to support them as responsible for the salmon decline. It is plain to see something much more fundamental is the blame.
The second ‘usual suspect’ is an ill-defined but ever-present ‘bogey man’ called climate change. It is true that the oceans are warming, including the North Pacific, but the warming is being seen over the course of many decades not a few years. Even if the decline of Chum might be correlated to such warming, the warming hypothesis does not offer a causative mechanism.
There are many other species of salmon and marine fish that share the Gulf of Alaska’s ocean pastures. All are in decline in both numbers and individual fish size. Big salmon like Chum and Kings have been shrinking by as much as 1% per year, that loss of size can only be attributed to less food.
It is clear that the problem is the carrying capacity of these vital ocean fish pastures. Fisheries management of salmon has never to this day considered the ocean life of salmon as important. They see their only mandate is to manage the ‘catch’ of salmon as they return to the rivers where they spawn. I know this well as for many years I enjoyed the biologist life being able to study returning salmon on government pay with a fishing rod in hand 
Interestingly we can look for part of the answer far to the south, to the lesson of the Chum salmon of the Fraser River that enters the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, British Columbia.
In 2016 the return of Chum Salmon to the British Columbia coastal rivers was the largest in history. It was declared ‘a salmon miracle’. But at the same time the other side of the Pacific, Japan’s chum salmon failed to survive as their dying ocean pasture produced the smallest catch in history, a ‘salmon tragedy’.
“2016 Chum Salmon return is estimated to be two million, the largest return on record,” said Lara Sloan of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in November of 2016.
“Catches in Johnstone Strait were some of the strongest on record. There have also been very strong returns of chum to the Nanaimo River.” Sloan said the spawning target was met early, with a total catch estimated at 150,000.
Fishermen also reported an astonishing and unexpected bonanza of salmon. Gillnetter Shaun Strobel fishes the west coast of Vancouver Island, and down the Johnstone Strait to Nanaimo “The fall net, or chum catch, is usually good”, he said. “But nothing like this.” The fisheries experts were all totally off on this one.
At first, the Chum salmon return was expected to be so low there was supposed to be a lottery to select a very few fishermen who would be allowed to fish commercially, but returns were so strong fishing was opened up in a free for all for everyone with no limits.
“Everybody was catching fish from the top of the straights up towards Alert Bay all the way down to Campbell River. We were catching fish everywhere,” said Vancouver Island salmon fisherman Shaun Strobel, who described catches of fish weighing down boats and threatening to break or sink nets.
“We were all doing the best ever.”“Although Fraser River sockeye numbers have hit a record low, Chum returning to the Fraser are doing extremely well,” wrote one fishing company’s general manager, Chris Kantowicz.
Kantowicz said the largest catch ever recorded in a Johnstone Strait chum salmon fishery took place Oct. 17 when one fleet pulled in 800,000 fish in a single day.
While fishermen are delighted the Federal Fisheries experts are saying ‘they have no idea’ why the unexpected bonanza of Chum Salmon showed up so utterly against all of their usually reliable projections.
Hmmm… What might have happened with regard to the Chum Salmon last year.
Let’s examine their 4-5 year life cycle and see if there are any clues. Chum salmon, like all salmon, lay their eggs in the gravel in freshwater rivers and streams in the fall of the year. The adults then die and their carcasses provide vital nutrients in the river that will grow river insects to feed their hatchlings. The eggs incubate over the winter and hatch in the early spring. The tiny Chum alevins emerge from their gravel incubators and are flushed/swim immediately to the ocean. In the Yukon that is a journey of nearly 2000 miles.
Chum are big salmon and they lay vast numbers of eggs, the eggs are big, this means there are vast numbers of healthy baby Chum hatching each year. No one knows precisely the numbers of young Chum, smolts, that go to sea each spring but surely the number is in the hundreds of millions.
Once in the ocean, the young Chum salmon spend as little time in the near-shore coastal waters as possible as that is a region full of all manner of hungry sea-life that love nothing more than baby salmon. The young salmon head out into the great North Pacific, the Gulf of Alaska promptly. There they are safer than in coastal waters as there are far fewer predators. But there, they are also at the mercy of the health of their ocean pasture. Chum are primarily plankton feeders, their survival depends on the condition of their ocean pasture. If the pasture blooms in abundance then the survival rate of the baby Chum salmon is very high and they grow big and strong over the next 4-5-6 years.
Mostly in recent decades the Chum salmon like so many salmon have provided a story of doom and gloom as they have simply not been returning from their ocean pastures. The ocean pastures of the North Pacific have been in a multi-decade history of worsening collapse. Without a healthy ocean pasture the health and abundance of the ‘livestock’, aka salmon, the pasture can sustain have plummeted.
Our CO2 is Killing Ocean Pastures, but perhaps not in the way you might think.
Ocean pastures are in cataclysmic decline in the North Pacific and indeed in every ocean of the world. The reason is not about the usual suspects, those big bad villains the overfishing folks or climate change. The reason is just a little bit of bad behaviour of each of us, but there are a lot of us – 7.4 billion and counting. Our CO2 emissions are killing ocean pastures in a very easy to understand manner.
CO2 is today high and rising in the global atmosphere and that’s indisputable. Humanity has in all of our yesterday’s of the fossil fuel age already spewed more than a trillion tonnes of Yesterday’s CO2 into the air. We’re busy now working on spewing another trillion tonnes of our CO2 plant food into the air that’s Tomorrow’s CO2. CO2 as we all know feeds plant life which is powered by the sun, and photosynthesis helps plants grow and exhale back oxygen into the air. How great is that you say, we all need to breathe oxygen.
But here’s the problem for the oceans. This is a blue planet as 72% is oceans, of the remaining 28% it’s not all land as about half that or 14% is ice and rock where nothing grows. Of the part where plants grow more than half is actually grass, not trees. So what is happening is that as our CO2 is helping plants on land grow, and let’s focus on the grass how can that harm the oceans.
Where plants living in mineral soil they live or die depending on whether nature delivers vital rain. We all know that when the rain doesn’t fall the grass dies off, but when the rain does fall the grass grows green and bushier. Well CO2 gives plants the ability to survive with far less rain! Hence our present world’s high CO2 has resulted in a vast amount of extra grass growing, its called ‘global greening.’
OK Plants on land need rain but CO2 lets them grow better with less rain. Stick with me.
Plants in the ocean, you know the 72% of this planet that is blue, actually, it is healthy when it is murky blue-green. Those plants live in water and what they need most is something that blows to them as the rain does for plants on pastures on land. Ocean pastures need dust in the wind. They have all the water they could ever use but they have no minerals.
Here’s the crux of the CO2 problem that grows more grass on land.
MORE GRASS GROWING MEANS LESS DUST BLOWING
Increasing grass, aka ground cover, is starving the ocean pastures to death due to loss of dust.
Back to our story of the twin miracles of Chum Salmon of 2016 and 2017
Did something happen in the North Pacific Chum Salmon pastures that helped the baby Chum salmon that came back last year as adults? No mystery there!
In the summer of 2012 just when the gazillions of baby Chum Salmon went out to sea to begin their 4-5 years of grazing and growing on their ocean pasture they found their pasture had miraculously returned to historic levels of health and productivity. This was no accident it was the result of the greatest ocean pasture restoration project in the history of ocean and fisheries science. Proof of this is that the work of a scant dozen earnest shipmates, my village crew, and our work to replenish vital mineral dust to the salmon pasture returned the largest salmon runs in history in perfect correlation with that work being ‘good shepherds’ for the ocean pasture.
Do the math for the Chum Salmon, just count from 2012-2013, that’s their 1st. year; 2013-2014, that’s 2 years, 2014-2015, that’s 3 years, and 2015-2016, that’s 4 years and the magic number for the southern Chum Salmon who are known for just that life-cycle! Chum Salmon miracle mystery solved, it was an intended miracle and it just worked.
Feeling skeptical? The miracle of the 2016 and 2017 Chum salmon are not the only salmon miracles!
In 2013, the year following my Gulf of Alaska ocean pasture restoration work the Pink Salmon of Alaska made up an even greater salmon miracle. Pink Salmon live for only two years. So let’s do the life cycle math. The Pink salmon that were eggs in the gravel of rivers and streams along the North American Pacific coast and hatched into baby salmon in the spring of 2012, like their cousins the Chum Salmon were swept and swam out to their vast ocean pasture that spring.
There instead of finding their ocean pasture was a desolate blue desert unable to sustain them they found it had been made into a restored Garden of Eden. Instead of mostly dying they grew and grew and before too long they swam back to their home rivers and streams healthy and strong. That swim home took place in the year 2013, remember Pinks live just 2 years so count em up the year 2012 is year one for the pinks, 2013 is their spawning year.
In Alaska, in 2013 the fisheries experts were confident within 5%-10% certainty that the catch of Pink Salmon would be between 50-52 million of the silver beauties. The experts were dumbfounded when the fishers caught not 50 million Pinks but 226 million of the silver beauties more than 4 times the number expected, the largest catch of salmon in all of Alaskan history. All up and down the Pacific coast reports came in of very stream no matter how small in Pink Salmon territory being absolutely jammed with spawning Pink Salmon. Surely many hundreds of millions of additional Pinks.
What’s next?
Restore ocean fish pastures everywhere and bring back billions of fish, salmon, cod, tuna, mackerel, and more… enough fish to help end world hunger! And save the planet at a cost of mere millions neither billions nor trillions as the sales folk of climate change would have the world spend.
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